What a Hussey!

When I was younger, I always identified with the characters played by Ruth Hussey. Rarely was she the leading woman and she never got the guy you knew she would be perfect for until the last reel. (That pretty much describes my life in a nutshell.) Along with Geraldine Fitzgerald, Gloria Graham and the deliciously bitchy Gail Patrick, Ruth Hussey was one of the best supporting actresses of Hollywood's golden age.

Hussey started her career in summer stock after graduating from the drama school at the University of Michigan. She went on to work as a radio fashion commentator in Providence, Rhode Island before landing a role in the touring company of Dead End. In 1937, she was signed as a features player by MGM and appeared in a string of B-movies and as a supporting player in A-pictures. She was one of the millions of women (I exaggerate, it was only hundreds) featured in the film The Women (1939) and she even had a small role in one the Andy Hardy films, Judge Hardy's Children (1937)

Hussey could be counted on to play the vixen or the cynical sophisticate with equal ability. In 1940, she got her best role as the cynical New York City Spy Magazine photographer, Elizabeth Imbrie, in The Philadelphia Story (1940). In the film Hussey was the scene stealer. Teamed with Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and James Stewart, I have to admit I always gravitated to and sympathized with Hussey's character.

Her Elizabeth Imbrie was at once comedic and sardonic never crossing into malicious and always sympathetic. She stuck by her indecisive emotionally elusive boyfriend, Mac Connor played by James Stewart, as he was swept up by Hepburn's flighty flaky Tracie Lord and you saw her heartbreak on screen when she realized the two might be closer than she ever imagined. But above all, Imbrie was steadfast and knew that Mac's infatuation was just that, an infatuation. She was mature and witty and even though her heart was bruised she kept her composure and her remarkable sense of humor. In the end, her loyality paid off when Mac realized his perfect match had been at his side the entire time. For this role she was nominated for an Academy Award for best Supporting Actress

In 1944, Hussey appeared in one of the best ghost movies of all time, The Uninvited. Prior to the release of this film ghosts were often played for laughs and The Uninvited was the first to portray a haunting as a genuine supernatural event.

The film also starred Ray Milland, Gail Russell and the wonderfully creepy stage actress Cornelia Otis Skinner. Hussey and Milland play a brother and sister who buy a classically haunted house on the English coast and battle a malignant and vengeful ghost in order to save their home and the life of local girl, Stella Meredith. This film is truly creepy and never ever campy. There is a seance scene that involves Russell's character channeling a Spanish speaking spirit that is truly unsettling.

I can just imagine what it would have been like to be in an audience in 1944, before the conventions of this genre were established, seeing something like The Uninvited on screen for the first time. The ad copy for the film called it "truly terrifying" and that is not an understatement. The film introduced the beautifully haunting song Stella by Starlight which is used as a theme throughout the film and is now a classic standard.

The Uninvited was made at Paramount and as Hussey's career at MGM wound down she began appearing in films at other studios. In 1945, she appeared on Broadway in State of the Union with Ralph Bellamy. As the demands of family life increased Hussey's career took a back seat to raising her children but she continued to make occasional screen and television appearances. Hussey died in 2005, at the age of 93.

A Hardy Kind of Life

There's something to be said about the small town nostalgia offered up in the Andy Hardy films produced by MGM between 1937 and 1958. The sentimental comedies were a slice of Americana, a picture of an idealized way we lived at the end of the depression and the end of the war.

The first film of the series, A Family Affair, hit theaters in 1937 and was intended to be a one off B-picture based on the play Skidding by Aurania Rouverol. Filmed in 17 days, A Family Affair reunited the cast of the popular family comedy Ah! Wilderness and starred with Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy with Lionel Barrymore and the fabulous Spring Byington as Judge and Mrs. Hardy , Sarah Haden as Aunt Milly and Cecelia Parker as sister Marian Hardy. After this initial film Barrymore and Byington were replaced by Lewis Stone and Fay Holden.

The Hardy family and their life in small town Carvel, Midwest USA was exactly the type of film that appealed to MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer. It's a 1930s dream town crafted by Mayer whose preference for the sentimental and patriotic was legendary. The Hardy's presented America with the image of a strong unified family headed by a stern but loving and approachable patriarch, Judge Hardy and a doting domestic mother, Mrs. Hardy. Further support came from sensible and sweet Aunt Milly, who did double duty as a Carvel High School English teacher. The Hardy's lived a solid middle class life that resembled many middle-class families with troubles that mirrored many American families troubles. The trailer was true for many people, the Hardy's could be your neighbors and that was a big part of their appeal.

While the early films featured plots that revolved around the entire family, soon the main storyline began to focus on Andy and his antics. He was always getting into some sort of youthful trouble with money, school, or cars and girls, (particularly with his on and off again steady Polly Benedict, played by Ann Rutherford). Since the Hardy films were immensely popular they offered a great platform to introduce new faces to the movie public. Andy had romantic adventures and entanglements with characters played by Lana Turner, Katherine Greyson, Esther Williams and Judy Garland among others.

However, not all of the films were light and breezy. Life Begins for Andy Hardy took a dark turn when following high school graduation Andy decides to strike off on his own in the big city. He finds himself embroiled in a romance with an older married woman and becomes friends with a young man who later commits suicide. Well, he dies of a heart attack in the final film because the censors had a little problem with the suicide.

The wonderful thing about the Hardy's is that they are not a family full of angst and resentment. They are not the type of modern American family we see in today's films with weekly therapy sessions and lives lived separately and so many issues. The Hardy's ate dinner together every night and the family discussed their problems as a unit. Famously, when Andy needed the wise advice of his father after finding himself in some sort of trouble they engaged in a man to man talk where the Judge reiterated the values of doing the right thing even if i was hard and not always beneficial to the sometimes selfish Andy. Each movie presented at its conclusion a moral lesson that helped Andy become a better man and a better citizen.

The Andy Hardy films were a pet project of Louis B. Mayer and if something filmed did not fit his idea of mom and apple pie America he demanded it be reshot. Mayer once insisted a scene where Andy is so heartsick he refuses to eat be rewritten because he could not believe a healthy American teenage boy, even a heartsick one, would refuse to eat anything for any reason. Also, in his eyes a good American boy would never insult his mother by sending away a dinner she worked so hard to prepare.

Mayer truly believed in the values put forth in the series and so did Americans. The Hardy films are said to be the most popular film series ever produced in the United States. In 1941, the cast was named the first family of Los Angeles by mayor Fletcher Bowron and the Academy Awards presented the series a special award in 1943 for representing the American way of life.

Gerard Jones, in his book "Honey, I'm Home! Sitcoms Selling the American Dream," says that the Hardy films created an ideal small town where traditional security and strong parental figures mixed painlessly with the slangy swinging world of modern teens. For conservatives audiences battered by unwelcome change, these movies provided a seductive fictional retreat to a place such citizens could believe they had once lived in and might create again.

One of the saddest, yet most telling images, I have ever come across on the Internet is a picture of a part of the MGM backlot that was home to Andy Hardy Street. This image of the deserted street speaks to how far removed we are from the world of Carvel, USA, the man to man talk and family dinners. While the Andy Hardy films showed life in a white middle class world the values of family, integrity, responsibility and citizenship are universal.

FILMOGRAPHY

A Family Affair (1937)You're Only Young Once (1937)
Judge Hardy's Children (1938)Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)
Out West with the Hardys (1938)
The Hardys Ride High (1939)
Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939)
Judge Hardy and Son (1939)Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940)Andy Hardy's Private Secretary (1941)
Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941)
The Courtship of Andy Hardy (1942)
Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942)
Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble (1944)
Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1946)
Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958)

Charleston. . .Charleston

What is it about the flapper that just makes me want to bob my hair and dance around my room like a carefree wild child. Watching videos of long dead young women dancing without abandon to the newest craze circa 1920 is beyond inspiring. True, not every women in the 1920s was a jazz baby or hot sheba but the ones that were somehow were in tune with the new modern age that was being born right there in front of them.

My favorite flapper however is a slightly more sanitized dame named Babe Doolittle from a 1947 technicolor confection called Good News. Hands down Good News is my favorite MGM musical. Sure, it stars Peter Lawford and June Allyson (no Fred and Ginger) but in this film about college life in the roaring twenties they are well cast and enjoyable to watch.

Good News also has the honor of including on of my top MGM dance numbers of all time - Joan McCracken and Ray McDonald dancing to Pass that Peace Pipe. Unfortunately, I can't find a clip of the number anywhere online so I will have to upload it myself. But, until then, I can show you the other top number in the musical a feel good finale called the Varsity Drag.

Click here to watch the Varsity Drag

If only all college dances could have been as swell as this. . . .sigh. . . to live in a musical. . . I think I feel a song coming on. . . .